Last night was the series premier of Joss Whedon's new tv series, Dollhouse, a typically complex, morally ambiguous, multi-genre pastiche about... well, I'll let Wikipedia do the honors:
In Dollhouse, Eliza Dushku plays a young woman called Echo, a member of a group of people known as "Actives" or "Dolls." The Dolls have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas, including memory, muscle memory, skills, and language, for different assignments. They're then hired out for particular jobs, crimes, fantasies, and occasional good deeds. On missions, Actives are monitored internally (and remotely) by Handlers. In between tasks, they are mind-wiped into a child-like state and live in a futuristic dormitory/laboratory, a hidden facility nicknamed "The Dollhouse." The story follows Echo, who begins, in her mind-wiped state, to become self-aware.[3][4]
Beyond Dushku's character, the show also revolves around the people who run the mysterious "Dollhouse" and two other "Dolls," Victor and Sierra, who are friendly with Echo (the names are simply letters in the phonetic alphabet). Although the Actives are ostensibly volunteers, the operation is highly illegal and under constant threat on one end from Paul Ballard, a determined federal agent who has heard a rumor about the Dolls, and an insane rogue Active on the other.[4]
Heather Havrilesky writes about it at Salonhere. And Salon also has an interview with Joss Whedon here. And I have a few thoughts of my own on the flip as I invite any other fans to weigh in as well.
First off, of course, I hope this show survives. Fox prematurely axed both Whedon's last series Firefly, and writer and producer Tim Minear's last two series, including The Inside which has thematic similarities with Dollhouse as well as with Buffy, The Vampire Slayer
And what are those thematic similarities? The struggle for--and against--self awareness and self-definition, to begin with. Both Buffy and Rebecca Locke, the young female protagonist in The Inside have hidden powers within, and both series are, in one sense, stories about drawing those powers out into world, out into the light. The same dynamic is at work in this series, clearly, but in a different form.
Echo is another young female protagonist, slightly older than either of the other two, but younger, too, in a way, because she has virtually no identity at first. She is almost an unprogrammed android.
The complexity of the relationship between good and evil, is another thematic similarity: The world can be morally black and white and shades of gray at the same time.
And, of course, there's bound to be more on the theme of the individual hero and their complex relationship with a surrounding social group.
This only begins to sketch out what's bound to emerge. But only vaguely sensing the depths ahead is a very big part of what the initial thrill is all about.
It is, quite naturally, a thoroughly Kegan Level 5 affair.
Here's a tantalizing little snippet of the Salon interview:
Early in your career you worked as a writer on "Roseanne," which was kind of a social realist comedy, and very much of its era. How much do you feel like your shows reflect their moment? Thinking about "Dollhouse," where the clients are these zillionaires -- are you going to have some of them being bankrupted by Madoff?
Well, we wrote all of it before all this economic hilarity, so we were like, "Yeah, people are really going to want to see this show -- a lot of billionaires, this is awesome!" Ultimately everything I do is pretty baldly classist -- like, the powerful people are taking advantage of the poor people, and they don't get it.
Looking at the set I was reminded of Wolfram and Hart, the creepy law offices in "Angel" that looked very normal and slick but were run by the devil.
Yes, it is the same designer. And we wanted the same feeling of, "Isn't this attractive? You can't leave."
And it's a similar idea of these mysterious people who seem very normal and slick, but are they ... evil?
Yeah. And we get to confront them with the consequences of what they do, and learn more about why they do what they do. Because very few people are entirely evil. I know it's hard to believe that after the last eight years of government in this country, but everybody has two sides, and I believe that not only are people often less or more righteous than they understand, but they often don't know what part of them is actually the good part. And a lot of the things that we prize in America might not actually be useful traits, and a lot of the things we vilify, to me, are not necessarily harmful, and that's something that's been in my work from the start.
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